The trap of co-dependency....

I've read a lot on this forum over the past few years about Co-dependence. It brought me to the reality a good while back that I have the disease. (if alcohol addiction can be a disease, why can't co-dependents?) I give credit to many of the posters on this forum for helping me to move past the (denial, mental block, ignorance, self-righteousness, fear) things in my little mind that has and does prohibit me from self-awareness and the ability to see and confront myself honestly.
Trying to keep this post short...I will just say that I am a middle child (two brothers) and I was the responsible one growing up....Both of my brothers probably have adhd, (never diagnosed) anyway, they were always into trouble and I was the one watching out for them at an early age. My first wife of 30 years was very dependent due to anxiety, migraines, and OCD. And of course my present wife has adhd and is on adderall. (when she remembers and decides to take it.)
Anyway, I rented a movie last night called Joy. I could not set still and wanted to turn it off several times...It's based on true events, and it reminded me so much of my life...It was painful to watch. I found myself suffering right along with this lady. It's a house full of dysfunction and the best example of Co-dependence I think you see...
Anyway I can report for the past year, and especially the last 6 months or so, my attempts at moving out of my co-dependent role has been mostly successful...NOT EASY :)....What I've struggled with is 1) CARE...I had to move past viewing co-dependency as acts of caring. 2) DEPENDENTS, the people who expect you to succumb to every whim, bale them out or run interference for them, they don't like it when you just smile; walk away and tell them they can handle it. Anyway, I'm getting better at recognizing my tendencies, my own life has gotten much easier to manage, and my stress level has went way down....life is good:)
I know many of you do and have struggled with this also...The CARE peace is huge and hard to move past....We may know what is right, (Co-dependency only creates invalids and adults who lack the responsibility to live as productive individuals) but to wean ourselves off of it is very difficult...
After watching this movie, I came away with a renewed sense of urgency to continue the road of freedom in this area....Medicine is bitter, but it will get us well....The D and the Co-D.....
Blessings All...
C

Comments

One other point about my own life, and those I've witnessed who have been Co-dependent most of their life...Is without intervention and awareness they will eventually turn to being Victims....When their own health fails and when they start realizing they spent their life making excuses for and carrying those who usually aren't even thankful, it can be crushing.....

much too early mousetrapped into the caretaker role in my family of origin. So I'm your companion in that.

I've often mused about your description of your struggle with order and disorder, or "chaos breaking out" in your home life, C. So familiar. If you were sandwiched between two (undiagnosed) sibs with ADHD, oy.

Back then, at least as my memories of how kids were handled in more families than mine, if any of the kids got in trouble, picked on each other, fought with each other, all of the kids involved were hauled into "court" and something done to them or said to them all, as if they were all responsible for what one of them did or didn't do, so yep I can see you defaulted into the peacemaker if your brothers were dealing with undiagnosed impulsiveness, etc.

I'm not sure of my own sibs....the three of us fled the family home like birds taking off to get away from a gunshot, so I haven't spent a whole lot of time and space with mine, over the adult decades. So I won't characterize them or drop therapeutic labels on them...I have a lot to learn about them...one and I have resumed a relation, the other likely is gone from the family for good...the family hammer may have hit hardest on him, back when we were kids..

I am sure, though, that I was mousetrapped into caretaker by my parents, both of whom were extremely immature emotionally, and one of whom (I've been told by a succession of therapists) was certainly Borderline & Narcissist. So I became the "regulator" of the emotional wellbeing of both parents and of their peaceability with each other....or I'd get hit, shouted, projected on, shamed.....etc etc.

I learned quick....I bet you did too, C...for me by the age of 5 as far back as my memories go, that I was "responsible" for the peace between two infantile adults who could not not fight each other, and for the peace of mind of one of them who was especially not well.

C, some of my road toward freedom from this deep, old conditioning to throw myself like a virgin onto someone else's volcano fire, to appease it, to do w hat someone else's erupting volcano needed to return to calmer wellbeing, began when I read Alice Miller's little book, Drama of the Gifted Child.

As I remember its content, it named the problem of a person living with another person who does not have a free standing ground of his or her own personality, but must make the second person fulfill his/her own lacks, kind of squeeze the second person like putty into the gaps and cracks of the first person's personality. This is HIGH octane conditioning of the second person into codependency. Kid putty in the hands of adults

Yes, I see codependency as a disease of relationship. It's a learned way of interaction. It can be relearned, replaced with something else.

I want to agree with you on a matter and perhaps bring up another angle or two about codependency, as I've seen it from living in it.

First, that very excellent post by Liz that listed features of codependency, recently, seemed partly, in some of its points, to have a very usual, and very useful skew in it toward the person who takes the role of the caretaker in the codependent couple: the fixer of problems, the cleaner of messes, the (drawing on my old reason for going to Alanon for awhile, decades ago) person who goes to pay bail, the one deeply tempted into doing everything possible to get the other person back on the wagon or back in balance. Other items on her lists I thought could equally apply to both the dependents in the relation, both the caretaker in the codependent relation and the "caretakee" To both the "parent" and the "child"

There is a very reasonable skew in discussions of codependency toward telling the caretaker in a codependent pair that he or she is as addicted to the relationship as the other in the couple, and as dysfunctional, in their pair-opposite way. That's exactly what Al Anon is about and why I went and what I learned, and began learning where my codependent habits came from. A lot of times, those habits of mind and action were taught in the original family, as happened to you and me. No surprise there

1) But It's called a codependent relation for a reason. There are two dependents in it, not just the caretaker. This means that there are two who actively and creatively keep tending the relation so that the relation keeps going, because it's giving an unhealthy bang for the buck to both in the relation, not just the caretaker, like you and me coming out of childhood. Maybe because codependency perhaps isn't dismantled too often by both in the couple having an equally powerful Eureka that they have a role in the dynamic, and simultaneously making a commitment to do something, and keep trying, until the couple together, manages to dismantle the codependent interaction, and still more maybes, maybe because Alanon talks to the partner or parent of the alcoholic, the therapeutic literature tends to skew toward talking to the "caretaker" or "parent" in the codependent role.

I think it needs to be seen really clearly that in a codependent relation, that "victim" or substance addict, or "child" is working away as hard at keeping the unhealthy dynamic in place as the "caretaker" is. That needs to be seen. It's not all "the fault" of the caretaker. It's not a job assigned to the caretaker to fix. C you're responsible and caring. Please DONT carry the burden of the whole relationship in your heart, as you work on what you are called to work on. Do just you, OK?

To agree with you yes alas, if you shift from a codependent response to a better kind of response, there will be some blow back...after all, the caretakee likely hasn't been convinced to get rid of codependency at the time that you are working on yoruself in i it. You've given witness to that, that it takes determination to insist on doing things a new and better way. That was my experience in the relation that got me to Alanon. After a long spell in which I stopped the "patsy" and the "supply," the "parent" and the "fixer" and got quite a campaign, non stop, to get me to abandon these things the person I was with chose the bottle, and I chose not living with his bottle. I'm not going to get into present storytelling, but for all of the work and learning I'm going through right now in my life, I am grateful beyond ability to express the gratitude that I'm with someone who has his challenges but very, very definitely, does not want to plug in with me so that I'm the Mommy. I guess I've graduated, partly, from codependency, although read on....

2) I very often think about what happens in a relation between adults when there are challenges, needs and unavoidable things to take care of...you pick it, the site is littered with stories that give examples. What if that happens and.... one of the two adults does nothing, zip, zero. Disappears from the problem. Never has time for it. Falls back and "allows" the other adult to take the hit. Doesn't put labor of any kind, mental, physical or financial, into addressing the challenge.

I am NOT talking about ADHD. I am talking about one of the two adults not showing up to clean up or to work for what the situation needs. Not showing up is a matter of moral, social and/or emotional lack of maturity. I had this, the "letting someone else take on the cost and care" happen in my family bigtime, and as far as I can see and guess, my sibs likely don't have ADHD, nor do I think my parents did.

Now, where does one adult not showing up to share the load leave the other adult of the pair?

In my opinion, that "no show" when the going gets tough, in an intimate relationship, leaves the partner who hasn't excused him/herself from work and responsibility for common good holding the bag. If it happens as a persistent thing, the "not showing up" of one of the two, leaving the whatever, care, work, expenditure on the other, tugs the one who is responsible toward that codependent relation, but it's a heavily situational one.

What DO you do, if you see your toddler walking around in the street because your partner was supposedly taking care of the child but "forgot" Well you go running out into the street to save the kid. Now, is THAT codependent? Is saving the kid from traffic being an overcarer? Is figuring out how to get the electricity turned back on because someone else didn't pay the bill being codependent?

Some of the solutions to this are the ones that Alanon advises all right, but we're not talking about an overcaretaker bringing her/his grooming into being codependent into the relation, again we're talking about being mousetrapped by a situation.

Sure you can tell a person who has had to default into being the one to clean up pay for fix, work the extra job that they chose a caretakee adult, but short of bailing on the entire relationship and getting away from the caretakee, what are the options, when the child is in the street and the heat went off in December? Lecturing someone defaulted into being the carer about being less codependent does nothing for the situation created by no-show. You and I know that this goes well, well beyond hiring out housecleaning, because C I remember that you retired because you could see the canyon that needed tending.

I wish you so much well. I really strongly believe, that one of your aces, C, you've been working on, really is an ace, and is the very right, very healthy way to go, which is acceptance of reality as it is, and releasing attachment of expectation. What an ace to put into play in a codependent dynamic.

Also take care of yourself, whatever that means to you. You're very worthy and a wonderful human being.

So you and I began by being mousetrapped as kids into caretaker roles in our relations. As far as I can see my present situation, it's part of my road in life nowadays, to continue the work of my own wellbeing. Given my history, that likely will always mean I'll have to deal with the tug toward being the caretaker. I do want to help, I don't want to be a patsy tin god. That was the hallucination in me that I found in Alanon. As I've written elsewhere about it I discovered in this stint of Alanon in my early thirties, that I had no personal ground of power yet. I had had my mind so homogenized as a kid, that I believed the (expletive) that was forced in me, that I was good and powerful if I poured everything out to put someone else's power right. That's got all kind s of things wrong with it. Only one is that it makes the "caretaker" the "powerful" one ONLY when s/he is pouring her power into someone else. Oh, and then the codependent caretaker can feel powerful "I was able to help him; therefore I exist"

History being what it is, that being squeezed into the cracks like putty of someone else when I was a little kid...really little... is always going to be back there. So I'll probably have to live with the task, as I continue to mature, of learning whatever lesson there is to learn, today, about how to live in what grounds us, C. I am grateful today, to know that you know you are under His wing. Wishing you well.

I wanted to add something to this discussion that extremely relevant to my "Going through the Wall" of my wife's denial that was of moments where I saw something "click" within her....that pause or hesitation and wheels were turning.

How I did this....was relate the many stories I've told my wife of two of my best friends growing up. The only word I can use to describe this family was "out of control!". And as a kid who was looking for somewhere I could go to get away from my own family dysfunction....there was no better place that to go see my two friends....(brothers 2 years apart)....since, the parents owned a bar and were never at home! lol You could see the draw for me there I think? lol

And they system used in that family was to make the older brother in charge of the younger one from a very early age. I met them both when I was 4 for the first time (the older one was 4 as well). So you might say...I grew up with them and was kind of part of the family in that respect. The parents treated me the same as their sons which was totally different than the role I knew at home.

For any time I was with them...I was automatically (by default) in charge of the younger brother too. Many times...it was just the two of since they were both close friends of mine in that respect.

So here's how that played out (exactly as you described...putty and all lol )

So if you've got one brother who robs banks all the time when ever he felt like it (which was all the time) without any control what so ever and didn't do anything K said.

And in case I was there too in those times....K got in trouble, I got reprimanded (slap on the wrist) and all three of us went to detention which usually meant doing some kind of house cleaning project since the parents were never home? lol

So now, K and J get in a big fist fight over this while I stand there and watch (many times! lol ) until one gave in to the other which was alway J.

Do you think J stop robbing banks? What do you think? lol

Yet....if K gets caught shop lifting and J and I are together. Who do you think got in trouble? J? Of course not. J never got in trouble by himself yet K did any time he slipped up.

As these two got older...this gap got even bigger. J became completely out of control in his behavior and was like a one man Vortex of destruction where ever he went. No matter how bad our misbehavior was.....J would find a way to one up everyone and always win in "who could be the worst behaved of all." Always! I have so many stories about these two it could fill a book...and the way the parents dealt with it was exactly how I said.

J got all the putty....and K (and I) got in trouble for him no matter what happened. J...was never punished or took the blame or responsibility for anything even once in his life. And K was constantly paying for J mistakes and was constantly beating on him every time it happened.

And I did a lot of house work when ever I happened to be there too.

We were all victims of this co-dependent situation and this I think....is where these roles come from.

As I witnessed this....it started even before these two got into first grade.

And of course....I loved every minute of it. How great was that for me? No parents....and kids put in charge!! It didn't get any better than that and why I love hanging out with these two friends' growing up.

At least for me at the time, I liked this co-dependent situation better than my own. I got to play a different co-dependent role at least...even if it was for only a little while.

And this was what I used to get my wife to consider her behavior now since....she was K and her younger brother was J and this was very similar if not the exactly same thing that she experienced herself growing up. And her younger brother...is not that much different in many ways...as J was in comparison.

This was one of those "light bulb" moments for my wife and why this hit the mark...so she could see how she is with me sometimes and why that's not working. "ding"

My Mom raised us three, my Dad left when I was 5....Mom worked and we kind of managed ourselves especially in the summer...My oldest brother is LD and wouldn't mind at all. He would sneak out at night and stuff...My Younger brother was probably the smartest in the family, but, his temper held him back and with out a Father in the home Mom couldn't do much with him....Nether of my brothers had much use for sports after little league anyway....Not enough patients, or ability to stay focused long enough for it....That (sports) probably keep me out some of the trouble. Also, I wasn't quiet as rebellious as those two...I was the quiet shy one...What happened!!!....

About the only fights we got into was over clothes...My youngest would try to slip out of the house on the weekends in my nice clothes and that wasn't going over well with me, because he didn't take care of his stuff...

Mom was tough, she would snatch a knot in your butt, if she had too...Probably why were still alive today....That and her prayers for us....Yep, we had lots of freedom back then much of by default...Had to grow up fast....

To enrage my wife after only a week of having to see herself like this.....and went on an all out attack and is now leaving. Over this. I can see the denial....was the only defense she had working to keep her anger in check. Without....she was left vulnerable which is why she attacked me. Viciously.

As you could see from my latest posts. I was putting down boundaries and blocking her efforts to manipulate me. On top of calling her out about Gaslighting. I actually had given her a print out of some really good info that I thought would be helpful to us about attachment theory. It wasn't too long after that ...when she tried to control me again and I called her out one more time saying "nice try....it won't work."

That's all it took. She saw me getting stronger...which made her more insecure and attempted to counter by dragging me back down.

Thank you my friend....for being there for me. You've helped me a lot and have renewed my faith. I feel this is for the best anyway and better to know it now than drag this out longer than it has to if this is the only way she can fill in the hole inside her.

In retrospect.....I took the chance and made the leap of faith. This I do not regret. Faith is a gift...and it was given freely from the heart. My heart is still in the right place....and I did my best. That's all you can do...you know?

peace:)

J

PS...I'm rethinking what I said earlier about Gaslighing (speaking only for myself and what my gut was telling me ) "A person who would do such a thing....Doesn't Love me." I'm going with my gut....after all. I may be biased....but it was what it was saying to me. I was just giving that faith and benefit of the doubt I was talking about. I still don't regret it.

There is a word that came to me as I was thinking about your situation and my own this morning...."Justify" Show are prove to be right are reasonable....If our efforts to communicate what we are experiencing and the effects it is having on us are being discounted by the mind the other person is subject to (for what ever reason) then our efforts will always be ineffective and in most cases lead to more division.

In simple laymen's terms what seems to be being said in these instances (in my own attempts anyway) is NO, what you are saying isn't good for me, thus, I want even hear it, and nothing after this point even matters to me....

In my experience with my wife it is has been vital for me to come to an understanding of WHY she takes this stance, and why she will interrupt, and not hear.

With us it is simply apples and oranges....Our view of life!....I speak in non-intrusive, taking responsibility for your actions tones....And she talks in every thing is OK, as long as I can "justify it" in my mind tones....And she really never wants to hear how that view of life effects those who live along side her... It is a fact of life that there is pain for any of us to hear things that are corrective in nature...It starts as children and only gets worse as we become hardened adults....

So I understand what you are saying about the boundaries; when there is such a wide gap in commonality and our view's on life in general....One or the other (or both) will have to protect themselves from the intrusiveness w/ boundaries....

What you said about responsibility is true. Only seeing out of one eye...makes it difficult to see more than one thing at a time. This is my wifes problem and I very much believe Alexithymia is a good guess? She wants this...and she wants that...both at the same time. She also saw what she was waling into...and then when she got there...it didn't suit here well. She easily forgets about that part and I can only do so much. Myopic?

A bit of hope at least in one respect. She has an appointment to see our T today by herself. This was already sheduled. The one thing I can always count on with him....you walk in thinking it's all about the other person...and you walk out with your head washed and a new hair dew! He can put you in your place and do it with velvet gloves like no other. Unlike me. lol

I mentioned Alexithymia last time I saw him...... and he immediately pulled out his pad and pen and started writing. That's always a good sign:)

What I do know without a doubt...is her worrying is tied to her anxiety...and her anxiety is tied to her impatience. She over worries about everything and can't let it go. That an a fair amount of delay...or inability to process. Too much to worry about all at once and it's my job to keep up with it so she doesn't feel anxiety. I'm thinking....not so much!

The hip bones connected to the ...thigh bone. The thigh bones connected to the...knee bone.....The knee bones connected to the....ADHD bone.......and that ain't how the dipsy doodle works around here at least? lol

Girl!...you mesmerize me with your incite...You have paralleled me in life in many ways...Also there is so much you've said here I would like to respond to, but,I really don't think it's necessary because you seem to know me so well....And, all I would be doing is confirming you, and telling you how much i agree w/ you:)

(I wish you so much well. I really strongly believe, that one of your aces, C, you've been working on, really is an ace, and is the very right, very healthy way to go, which is acceptance of reality as it is, and releasing attachment of expectation. What an ace to put into play in a codependent dynamic.)

I really feel like the Lord has lead me to this place. He know's our tendencies :(, And he loves us anyway! I can't love her like she deserves if I don't accept her. I can be selfish about wanting my way...LOL...I bet I didn't have to tell you that..Ha Ha....